Even the naturalist claims of anti-humanism crumble when viewed with a long enough time scale. Assuming no humans and a pristine earth then the terran biosphere has a specific, finite and absolutely iron clad time limit: roughly 1.3 billion years at which point the Sun will obliterate Earth and all its attendant life.
Only human consciousness offers a potential for escaping this iron trap. Human intelligence, in this time span, could conceivably escape the Terran gravity well into the rest of the solar system and, in time, to other stars. Humans would, naturally, carry the terran biosphere (to one degree or another though, knowing humans, we'd eventually try to move almost all of it) to potentially innumerable worlds. Life would flourish inconceivably longer than the hard limit 1.3 billion years it could maximally enjoy on Terra.
Nietzsche makes approximately this point in _Twilight of the Idols_:
"After all, judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms,—per se such judgments are nonsense. You must therefore endeavour by all means to reach out and try to grasp this astonishingly subtle axiom, *that the value of life cannot be estimated*. A living man cannot do so, because he is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute, and not a judge; nor can a dead man estimate it—for other reasons."
I love your FF&F article, but I wonder if some of today's nihilism about the value of human life is coming from something more basic. Just yesterday I was watching a documentary about a completely different subject, and a teenage boy in it talked about how getting stabbed a few years earlier made him realize how much he valued his life, which he hadn't taken very seriously before. It's a cliche to say that an encounter with death makes you appreciate the preciousness of life, but maybe it's a cliche because it's a common experience. For most of human history people really had to struggle to stay alive, and maybe it's because few people in the modern west really have to struggle for it before they're old, coupled with the fact that we live on a way more crowded planet than ever before, that human life seem about as valuable as kudzu to some people.
This probably gets even sharper if you feel like someone is actively trying to kill you. Like if your grandmother, when she got pregnant the second time, had said, "Eh, the Holocaust shows that life is pain, especially for Jews, so I won't give birth to another one," that would have been a posthumous victory for Hitler, wouldn't it?
Why can’t one coherently ask the question: has my life so far felt like a net positive to me? And is my best guess at my go-forward life likely to feel like a net positive to me? (Where “me” might be “to me and people whose happiness is likely impacted by my existence). Intuitively I feel like I can answer this question (my answer is implied by my being around to compose this comment). I assume this is implicitly the question people who contemplate suicide are asking, whether or not the ability of a depressed person to make that calculation is top notch. And isn’t that basically the same question as comparing existence to non-existence?
I’m open to the possibility that I’m just wrong, but I don’t actually think it *is* possible to compare one’s life to a state of nonbeing. We can imagine non-being as a sleep-like state, and compare our waking life to that and find it wanting — but that’s not what non-being is, right? And we can compare our life now to what it used to be, or what we thought it would be, and find those comparisons intolerable. We can find this moment of life intolerable because of pain (physical, psychic, whatever) and choose to die as the only escape. But I’m not convinced we can *rationally* make the comparison.
I think there are other factors that play into suicide, meanwhile. The *prospect* of death might be appealing, for example, as could the prospect of a *particular* death — one with honor, say, or with dignity. Those positives are experienced by a living person with death in prospect; they aren’t experienced by the person after death. And I think they loom large in suicidality — whether chosen rationally or not.
Finally, even if I’m wrong and you can rationally compare being to non-being for yourself on their own terms, I don’t see how you could decide for someone who doesn’t exist yet — not even someone who predictably will suffer. You might say that’s a knock-down argument against bringing someone into being — they didn’t choose it, and they might not like it. But that, again, is mere pessimism married to the precautionary principle.
Even the naturalist claims of anti-humanism crumble when viewed with a long enough time scale. Assuming no humans and a pristine earth then the terran biosphere has a specific, finite and absolutely iron clad time limit: roughly 1.3 billion years at which point the Sun will obliterate Earth and all its attendant life.
Only human consciousness offers a potential for escaping this iron trap. Human intelligence, in this time span, could conceivably escape the Terran gravity well into the rest of the solar system and, in time, to other stars. Humans would, naturally, carry the terran biosphere (to one degree or another though, knowing humans, we'd eventually try to move almost all of it) to potentially innumerable worlds. Life would flourish inconceivably longer than the hard limit 1.3 billion years it could maximally enjoy on Terra.
Nietzsche makes approximately this point in _Twilight of the Idols_:
"After all, judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms,—per se such judgments are nonsense. You must therefore endeavour by all means to reach out and try to grasp this astonishingly subtle axiom, *that the value of life cannot be estimated*. A living man cannot do so, because he is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute, and not a judge; nor can a dead man estimate it—for other reasons."
I love your FF&F article, but I wonder if some of today's nihilism about the value of human life is coming from something more basic. Just yesterday I was watching a documentary about a completely different subject, and a teenage boy in it talked about how getting stabbed a few years earlier made him realize how much he valued his life, which he hadn't taken very seriously before. It's a cliche to say that an encounter with death makes you appreciate the preciousness of life, but maybe it's a cliche because it's a common experience. For most of human history people really had to struggle to stay alive, and maybe it's because few people in the modern west really have to struggle for it before they're old, coupled with the fact that we live on a way more crowded planet than ever before, that human life seem about as valuable as kudzu to some people.
This probably gets even sharper if you feel like someone is actively trying to kill you. Like if your grandmother, when she got pregnant the second time, had said, "Eh, the Holocaust shows that life is pain, especially for Jews, so I won't give birth to another one," that would have been a posthumous victory for Hitler, wouldn't it?
Why can’t one coherently ask the question: has my life so far felt like a net positive to me? And is my best guess at my go-forward life likely to feel like a net positive to me? (Where “me” might be “to me and people whose happiness is likely impacted by my existence). Intuitively I feel like I can answer this question (my answer is implied by my being around to compose this comment). I assume this is implicitly the question people who contemplate suicide are asking, whether or not the ability of a depressed person to make that calculation is top notch. And isn’t that basically the same question as comparing existence to non-existence?
I’m open to the possibility that I’m just wrong, but I don’t actually think it *is* possible to compare one’s life to a state of nonbeing. We can imagine non-being as a sleep-like state, and compare our waking life to that and find it wanting — but that’s not what non-being is, right? And we can compare our life now to what it used to be, or what we thought it would be, and find those comparisons intolerable. We can find this moment of life intolerable because of pain (physical, psychic, whatever) and choose to die as the only escape. But I’m not convinced we can *rationally* make the comparison.
I think there are other factors that play into suicide, meanwhile. The *prospect* of death might be appealing, for example, as could the prospect of a *particular* death — one with honor, say, or with dignity. Those positives are experienced by a living person with death in prospect; they aren’t experienced by the person after death. And I think they loom large in suicidality — whether chosen rationally or not.
Finally, even if I’m wrong and you can rationally compare being to non-being for yourself on their own terms, I don’t see how you could decide for someone who doesn’t exist yet — not even someone who predictably will suffer. You might say that’s a knock-down argument against bringing someone into being — they didn’t choose it, and they might not like it. But that, again, is mere pessimism married to the precautionary principle.
So it seems to me, anyway.